Isis Unveiled: chapter I (an axiom of hermetic philosophy)

“The clergy of the three most prominent Christian bodies, the Greek, Roman Catholic, and Protestant, discountenance every spiritual phenomenon manifesting itself through the so-called “mediums”.

A very brief period, indeed, has elapsed since both the two latter ecclesiastical corporations burned, hanged, and otherwise murdered every helpless victim through whose organism spirits – and sometimes blind and as yet unexplained forces of nature – manifested themselves.

At the head of these three churches, pre-eminent stands the Church of Rome. Her hands are scarlet with the innocent blood of countless victims shed in the name of the Moloch-like divinity at the head of her creed. She is ready and eager to begin again. But she is bound hand and foot by that nineteenth century spirit of progress and religious freedom which she reviles and blasphemes daily.

The Graeco-Russian Church is the most amiable and Christ-like in her primitive, simple, though blind faith. Despite the fact that there has been no practical union between the Greek and Latin Churches, and that the two parted company long centuries ago, the Roman Pontiffs seem to invariably ignore the fact.

They have in the most impudent manner possible arrogated to themselves jurisdiction not only over the countries within the Greek communion but also over all Protestants as well.

“The Church insists”, says Professor Draper, “that the state has no rights over anything which it declares to be within its domain, and that Protestantism being a mere rebellion, has no rights at all; that even in Protestant communities the Catholic bishop is the only lawful spiritual pastor.”

Decrees unheeded, encyclical letters unread, invitations to ecumenical councils unnoticed, excommunications laughed at – all these have seemed to make no difference. Their persistence has only been matched by their effrontery.”